Author: juliusaugustus

At Linaro Connect Vancouver 2018, some engineers are showing the Open Source Chromium OS running on the 10nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 845. With some talk on the status of using Freedreno for hardware accelerated GPU support in that Chromium OS demo. Over the past few months this solution has been upstreamed into the mainline kernel, display driver, audio driver, wifi driver, all the connectivity and periferal storage drivers, all to make Chromium OS work on that chipset. Running the 4.18 kernel with very few additional patches, it has hardware accelerated video playback using the open source freedreno driver. This could be a clue towards what I think could be an ultimate ARM Powered Laptop, a Snapdragon 845 Powered Chromebook would be so awesome, with Gigabit LTE, with good ARM single thread and multi-thread performance, with smooth Android and Linux apps supported, perhaps even it would be nice if Microsoft could contribute full x86 and ARM compiled Windows 10 apps support directly on this device.

Ultra96 is an ARM-based, Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC development board based on the Linaro 96Boards Consumer Edition specification. The processor is a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MP ZU3EG A484 and the RAM is a Micron LPDDR4 memory provides 2GB of RAM in a 512M x 32 configuration. The Ultra96 includes 40-pin 1x 96Boards Low-speed expansion header and 1x 60-pin 96Boards High speed expansion header. The 96Boards’ specifications are open and define a standard board layout for development platforms that can be used by software application, hardware device, kernel, and other system software developers. Ultra96 represents a unique position in the 96Boards community with a wide range of potential peripherals and acceleration engines in the programmable logic that is not available from other offerings.

Shiratech is an Israeli company that creates development boards. Shiratech produces ARM system on modules that cut time to market significantly and reduce project development risk. Shiratech has several new platforms launching soon.

Open source technology enables collaboration between projects, but also runs into hurdles with intellectual property and has lawyers to protect it. Jilayne Lovejoy is an internationally recognized lawyer that specializes in open source technologies. Jilayne has a legal background in intellectual property. Jilayne co-leads the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) legal team, maintains the SPDX License List, and was a founding member of the OpenChain project.

Andrea Gallo is VP of the Segment Groups and strategic initiatives at Linaro. The current project he is working on is machine learning for the ARM ecosystem through. These efforts can help reduce fragmentation and forking for open source projects related to deep learning and neural networks. Deep learning, neural networks, and artificial intelligence enable richer more powerful applications on mobile and embedded.

Grant likely is a Senior Software Developer at ARM and a developer for the EBBR project https://github.com/ARM-software/ebbr. The EBBR or Embedded Base Boot Requirements is a specification for bootloaders for ARM based devices. This specification would enable arm based devices to share the same bootloader thus reducing development costs. This would enable the same OS to more easily boot on multiple devices

Shiratech produces ARM system on modules that cut time to market significantly and reduce project development risk. The Mezzanine board by shiratech is a dev board that provides LTE connectivity and can be connected to an arduino or Raspberry Pi. The SPECIFICATIONS are MAX-10 10M04: 256 FPGA package, 4K Logic Elements, 189Kb Block memory, Up to 156KB user FLASH memory, Dual internal configuration, and 178 GPIO FPGA programming using Altera standard programming connector.

Koen Kooi is a release manager at Linaro, developer on the Angstrom project, contributor to the Kodi project, demonstrating Kodi running on a lot of different development boards at Linaro Demo Friday here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wipB2_6OKus One of his projects is video playback using accelerated decoding. This accelerated playback can be used in Kodi as well as in HTML5 and web video playback.